Oh my god does watcom suck

Posted on March 5, 2011 by neozeed

The things I see go through my blog… Well someone googled that (blogger.com shows me top hits, on what people search, and how they got here).. and I have to admit it made me laugh.

But my exposure to Watcom really didn’t start until I was in college, and I found some $99 offer to buy Watcom 10.0 CD only package. At the time I thought it was super exciting, because it not only included 32bit tools, but also the 16bit stuff. At the time, I still had a 286 running OS/2 so for me this was awesome!

So for my $99 I got a 32bit MS-DOS,OS/2,Windows NT & Novell Netware compiler, along with a 16bit MS-DOS, Windows & OS/2 compiler.

Ok, so that’s the ‘good’. All the documentation was online, which was ok, but it was in like 30 different files…. The UI was weird, but really in the early 1990s everyones UI was odd. Heh even Microsoft ended up taking over the UI from QuickC for Windows as their ‘professional UI’.

Now what of the Watcom Legacy? Well sure we all know that the iD software guys, used Watcom as their 32bit compile to ship DOOM to the MS-DOS world. Just as 3D Realms used it for Duke Nukem 3d!. But I’d suspect this was mostly because of the DOS4G/W DOS Extender, and it’s royalty free redistribution with Watcom C++. From what I understand Pharlap TNT was *VERY* expensive to license, with regards to it’s royalty price.

Also at the time, Watcom C++ was the fastest compiler available.

But time and competition wasn’t kind to Watcom. Eventually the language company slipped, was purchased for a side product sold off and killed. It’s kind of funny that a language company that produced a SQL server as a necessity ended up being the only product that people sought, and didn’t want to let discontinue.

So sure Watcom C/C++ was a great compiler for it’s time, but the time has passed. In the meantime we are lucky that it’s been open sourced so it hasn’t faded off to oblivion.

Although the C/C++ is what people know them for most, Watcom had a lot more, as seen in their source, they did have support for the Dec Alpha. also did have a Fortran compiler. Back a long long time ago, this Waterloo Ontario based company used to supply computer languages to all kinds of Canadian endeavors. It’s a shame that us kids never got to really see them, but rather it was more so for research as I’m lead to understand.

So really what separated Watcom from say Microsoft? Maybe it was their proximity to research? Maybe government contracts? Perhaps reluctance to enter the operating system business? I don’t know it’s really hard to say, I’m sure it’d make an interesting documentary but I’m afraid the audience would be pretty small.

But then again the Canadian government does like to green light this kind of thing, so maybe someone out there will take it up.

At any rate, I’m sure others may want to chip in on how they feel about Watcom.

—-
edit
I see now that the phrase actually comes from doom

‘!’, // shift-backslash – OH MY GOD DOES WATCOM SUCK

This is in the heads up code, hu_stuff.c

So I guess that ends that eppisode.

Internet Explorer 6 countdown.

Posted on March 4, 2011 by neozeed

So I saw this post on /. talking about the IE 6 countdown page from Microsoft.

So, after helping someone verify the needed flags to install Windows NT 4.0 on Qemu 0.14.0 ( C:\temp\qemu-0.14.0>qemu.exe -L pc-bios -cpu pentium -hda nt4.disk -net nic,model=pcnet -net user -cdrom “\install\nt4workstation.iso” -m 16 ) I thought I’d try this sucker in Internet Explorer 3.0

IE 6 countdown, on IE 3

Hell you’d think they’d at least make the page VIEWABLE in older browsers.. I didn’t even try IE 2.0 just yet, as I almost bet it can’t even pop the page…. Seeing that IE 2.0 isn’t even HTTP 1.1 compliant.

What is interesting is the high numbers in China, India, and South Africa. I wonder how many of those IE6 users are on NT 4.0? I wonder how many IE 5.5 users are running Windows 95? How many are simply using older computers that these new modern titan operating systems simply will not load on.

At any rate, here is the site on IE6 / Windows 2000…

IE6 countdown on.. IE6

Oh well my $0.02 on the whole thing.

Migrating Windows 2003 servers to Proxmox/VE

Posted on March 3, 2011 by neozeed

So I’ve had this Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 install that has been chugging along since.. Well 2005. On hardware we scrounged around at work from 2000. So as you can gather, it’s getting OLD. Real old.

So now after a panic, we are finally at the crossroads of what to do from here.

Now most people would expect us to just “migrate” the server to Hyper-V but there is some major shortfalls I’ve had with Hyper-V. First you can’t remotely manage it very easily. God help you if you are on the road, on a notebook, or even… On your parents computer. The idea that you must be on a domain, and install some 300MB+++ file is totally insane, and completely unacceptable.

The other catastrophic issue we’ve had is that running the x64 version of OpenBSD has been met with failure so that enterprise is virtually over.

So, let’s revisit Proxmox VE.

Now to start small, I’m going to migrate the 2003 domain controller. Luckily it’s configured for IDE disks (phew!) and basically doesn’t do anything else other then act as a DC. The steps to do this in a quick and easy manner is something like this:

1 Remove those blasted MS extensions! You can ONLY do this while you are under MS Virtual Server. Really. I expect this also holds true for Hyper-V.

2 Next run the mergeide.reg, file which will tell 2003 (probably 2000 and above…) to enable all the IDE controller types on boot, so you don’t get locked out…

3 Next download and install this GREAT program, selfimage (sorry for the lame download thing), and go ahead and run it.

Make sure you set the source to being a WHOLE DISK, not a partition… Start with the C drive. (I always try to get the OS going before going after data drives & whatnot….).

Next you can set the target to NBD and point it to your proxmox server, and set the port to 1024.

I didn’t know this, but NBD is a network block device! So instead of playing with intermediate disks, formats, and all this other painful crap, we can instead basically dd from one disk to another over the network, with little effort. I would imagine for the WindowsPE crowd this would be a massive win, to say image disks out of other servers, or even LIVE servers.. Although if it were SQL I sure would shut down the database server at this time.

On the proxmox server go ahead and create a ‘destination’ VM, that you will copy the VM into. It’s recommended you make the destination disk larger then the source disk, so there isn’t any nasty rounding errors.

Now putty into the proxmox machine, and then you have to launch the nbd server. The syntax is something like this:

qemu-nbd -t /var/lib/vz/images/xxx/vm-xxx-disk.qcow2

The filename may be slightly different, so don’t sweat it too much, but basically you are telling qemu-nbd to ‘serve’ this virtual disk.

With all of this in place, you can now hit the start button on the SelfImage application and it’ll start to block copy!

I have a slow network where I’m doing this so it took me about an hour to do 32GB.

Once it is done, you can terminate qemu-nbd with a Control+C, then try to start up the VM on Proxmox.

Two things I ran into:

Some error about processor.sys, and a 0x000000CE error code. For me the easy way out of this is to shut down the VM, and re-configure it to disable KVM. In this mode it will be SLOW. But once booted up, you can issue the following from a command prompt:

sc config processor start= disabled

Shut down the VM, turn on KVM, and start it up again. Also the start= isn’t a typo, it really is entered that way.

The other error I had was a INTERNAL_POWER_ERROR blue screen. I tried playing with the ACPI, and some other stuff to no avail. The only way to seemingly ‘fix’ it was booting up again with KVM disabled, and when I tried to login, windows immediately started to shutdown.. Re-enabling the KVM option then let me boot normally. I’m still a little lost as to what this was all about.

So with all the little stops here & there, my VM is now running on Proxmox VE.

Xenix 286 on Qemu

Posted on March 1, 2011 by neozeed

I nearly forgot to mention this… But a friend had some issues with an ancient 486 box running Xenix 286 and made a disk image of it. The box finally died, and he lost his copy with some disk accident (double trouble!) but he did send me a copy to see if it’d work under Qemu… At the time it didn’t.

So while I was transferring his disk image back to him, and looking around on ebay for a 286 board, I figured I’d try Qemu 0.14 to see how badly it failed…

And…

It worked!

I can’t say I’ve thoughtfully tested it, but it seems pretty workable.. I have no idea about what editions work, and which do not… I have no idea if this version knows it’s on a 386 and uses a 386 friendly method to switch to protected mode, or what.. Then again it being Xenix, it won’t need to constantly pop between real & protected modes, unlike, say Windows 3.0 / windows 3.1 or OS/2 1.x ..

Microsoft Word and Ribbons….

Posted on March 1, 2011 by neozeed

I came across some startling news today.

Those of us that have hated all this new ‘ribbon’ talk since Office 2007, seemed to have forgotten that the blasted ribbon was there all the time. Most of us called it a tool bar for some reason, but here let me show you.

Word 1.1 for OS/2

Here is Microsoft Word 1.1 for OS/2

What’s that?

Hello, ribbon?

Now with no ribbon!

And here we go!

Ok but what about Word 2.0?

Microsoft Word 2.0 for Windows

Word 2.0 for Windows

What is this? Ribbon??!?

Word 2.0 with the ribbon off

Word 2.0 with no ribbon.

Ok but what about Word 6.0? Although they were going to write a whole new engine for Word, they gave up, and instead revamped the Word 2.0 engine, although…

Word 6.0 for Windows NT

Let’s try Word 6.0 for Windows NT! The first 32bit Windows Word processor from Microsoft.

Oh what’s this? No ribbon?

That’s right, the ribbon just got renamed, and buried.

So there we go there has always been a ribbon in Microsoft Word, but it’s become another toolbar to only resurface and take over the entire interface. Although I’m not a Word expert by any stretch, I do have to say, if I was given the chance, I’d certainly go back to the Word 6.0 interface ….

But I guess I’m just old.

AT&T 3b1 emulator

Posted on February 19, 2011 by neozeed

while checking out some random link on some vintage ads, I found this exciting development..

Philip Pemberton’s 3b1 emulator.

While a work in progress, he’s getting there, so far it’s capable of booting the diagnostic diskette, although I couldn’t get it to run any programs….

3b1 emulator

I’ve personally only dealt with the 3b2’s so I don’t know all that much about the 3b1’s short of them running some SYSV (r2?) Unix, and it was some half hearted attempt by AT&T at marketing Unix to the masses.

I’ve built the emulator under windows, and compressed it up here.

It’s interesting though, and more interesting to see where it will go…

VM/386

Posted on February 18, 2011 by neozeed

So I picked up this old 386 multitasker on amazon called.. VM/386. I remember seeing ads on how awesome it was back in the day.

VM/386 diskettes

VM/386 1.2 splash screen

So much to my luck, I not only got 1.2 but 1.22! Even luckier all the disks read! However what ever magic they employed doesn’t work under any emulation … 😐

Sure it’ll load up, and let you do some options.. But this is all I get.

VM/386 in action

I’ve tried it on various Qemu levels, I’ve even used a real cirrus logic video ROM (from an ISA board, I’ll have to find a PCI cirrus logic ROM…) VMware, Virtual PC, and Virtual BOX.

Has anyone ever used this thing? I was under the impression it was multiuser as well as multitasking but it seems from what little I’ve been able to use that it’s only multi tasking…

Oh well I guess another sem-interesting update in MS-DOS multi-taskers.

— edit

And… I just got word of a copy of 2.0 and it’s being shipped.. 5 user version too!

Qemu 0.14.0 released!

Posted on February 17, 2011 by neozeed

After a very short release cycle, Qemu 0.14.0 is done!

i386/x86_64 build is here.

MIPS/PowerPC/Arm/m68k/SH4.

I’ve merged in the PS/2 keyboard fix, and set the NE2000 to 0x300 IRQ 3. These are untested, but meanwhile, Enjoy!

Windows NT December 1991 Preview

Posted on February 16, 2011 by neozeed

So I re-read that great book, showstopper! which recounts the race to bring Windows NT to market.

So after a lot of digging around I managed to find an old CD, the second public showing of Windows NT, the December 1991 pre-release.

This is the first version that contained both MIPS and i386 binaries. At the time there were lots of issues with the MIPS processors, and the MIPS port of NT was slipping behind the i386 in major ways. So between the first public display of Windows NT at the 1991 COMDEX in October, there was a major push to bring the MIPS release up to some level of parity.

On the way to making Windows NT the team started by cross compiling from OS/2 1.3 machines. And in this release they left the cross compilers in there, which is kind of cool. So I just compiled a simple console application, like this:

And then running it under the pre-release..

Which is pretty neat when you consider it.. And of course in the book there is the coming break with IBM as they pushed not only for the dominant Win32 personality, but also to make NT self hosting. According to the book, NT was self hosting some time in March of 1991, with NT being text only. The first graphics started to show up around May, and Networking as late as August.

Installing the beta is a little interesting as there is no ‘setup’ program at this point. The easiest way to install it is from within MS-DOS. There is a batch file that will xcopy in the needed parts, and then uses debug to write in a new bootsector. After a lot of trial and error I found that the disk works best when it’s under 500MB.

And away we go!

What is interesting about these 1991 releases is that they didn’t include any of the subsystems other then the Win32 subsystem. And the user login screen here actually doesn’t even take the password it’s just a dummy screen. Windows NT is configured from a plain text file nt.cfg . The registry has only begun it’s work at this stage, but it’s just not there.

reversi!

From a user standpoint it looks and feels more like Windows 3.0 or an early Windows 3.1 beta. Which should be expected from the timeline. Even the games, it’s solitare, winmine, and reversi! All in 32bit glory! Even the help about screen for program manger lists that it’s running in “NT MODE”, as opposed to REAL, STANDARD or 386 Enhanced modes, which were available at the time for Windows 3.0 .

Another thing, is that the ‘administrative’ tools didn’t exist yet. I do know the net command had the start/stop so services are there, if only hidden. NT really didn’t start to feel more like NT until late 1992 when it was getting really close to being feature complete, as they shook the bugs out.

Now the install media has this ‘special’ boot floppy to do a GUI install, which Qemu won’t support because of the lack of the ancient scsi controllers of the time. But with a little pathing I managed to get it to run under NT. I’ll spare you the middle bits, but if you can you can get them here.

magic happens…

And there we go!

Another interesting thing I stumbled across from this time was this: InfoWorld article, which is an interview with Steve Balmer just after the October COMDEX show.

It’s really neat to see something as prolific like Windows NT, which has installed seats in the hundreds of millions what it was like when it was so young and vulnerable.. It certainly was ‘forward thinking’ in that it didn’t run all that well on 386’s with 8MB of ram, a ‘power house’ of a computer back then. But it scales up to machines like my laptop with 8 cores and 6GB of ram just fine. By forcing the portability NT like any other *NIX just ports over and keeps on going.

As a silly story when NT 4.0 was in it’s heyday (sp2!) I ran a Compaq Desqpro 386 with 16MB of ram with NT 3.1 Advanced Server as a MSMail hub. And It’s kind of funny in retrospect but I had all the SQL servers using it for alerts and whatnot, and when it came to uptime NT 3.1 had all the 4.0 stuff beat. Then again NT 3.1 was the ‘pure’ architecture version, before they started the crazed speed hacks of the video/printer stuff moving to kernel space… Oh well that’s my $0.02.

PCEm

Posted on February 16, 2011 by neozeed

So looking around for other IBM PC emulators, I came across this one, PCEm. Now what’s really cool about this one is the old models it can emulate, including the IBM XT, the IBM AT, and it can even run the AMI BIOS for a 286, 386 and 486!

PCem 486

So not only can it run the BIOS but some ‘fun’ stuff like Windows 3.0 & 3.1 in standard mode, (386 enhanced is busted.. )

Setting up Windows 3.1 on EGA

I find the 486SX mode works the best… And naturally fastest as it’s cycle accurate emulation. An interesting mode is the IBM 386, which appears to be the IBM AT’s BIOS patched to run on a 386 CPU.

PCem MSD report

What is cool though, is the 386 protected mode is complete enough for DOS4G/W executables to run…

Loading DooM!

And yes if your CPU is set to low enough Mhz it will take a minute or two to load as it did back in the day…

PCem running DooM

And away we go! I should add this is Doom 1.1 shareware, which I did manage to get the sound working on OS/2 2.1, and it’s great to hear that PCEm’s soundblaster emulation works great!

For DOS games, this emulator really has a wide range of machines, and with the actual BIOS it sure gives the original ‘experience’.

*NOTE you’ll need disk images, and lots of them… or some scheme to mount the raw disk image. Also the UI is touchy I’ve already lost one disk to it….

Virtually Fun

Fun with Virtualization

Author Archives: neozeed